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Good budget smartphone

Cons-Screen may be to small for someNo Camera ButtonMicrophone can be easily covered when calling.

I personally really like this phone and have owned it for around 5 months, I feel for my needs as a young person it does pretty much all I need, First I will mention that I find calls and texting very enjoyable, Its very responsive and the call quality is clear and texting is very easily laid out and I feel for me the screen and keyboard is just the right size. However I do find that it can be hard to hold the phone without cover the microphone located at the bottom of the phone.

Social networking on this phone is enjoyable, I use alot of networking apps for eg, (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) and I find they run very well, I don't experience any lagging or freezing.

The camera on this phone is 5MP with no flash so if you like taking pics in clubs and at night this phone would not be ideal but for a everyday camera, I would say it does the job, photos come out clear with good colour quality to them.

As for apps if you are looking to run loads of games and other apps at the same time this probably is not for you, but if like me you just like to check your social networking apps and maybe a occasional game of temple run here and there this phone will serve you great. it can lag if to many processes are left running but that is easily solved by stopping certain apps.

This phone is also equipped with Wi-Fi and GPS and Bluetooth which also work very well but if all left on will drain your battery.

Over all this phone is great if you want a smartphone that can do most things young people want now days eg, social networking, getting around and taking pics.

Age- teens +

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The better side of middle of the road

I opted for this smartphone in 2012, when I was due to upgrade. I researched other handsets, which were available at the time, but decided the features of this HTC outweighed others. The phone was shipped out to me the next day by my network provider and naturally the first thing I did was play.

I chose the white handset, with a silver effect facia surrounding the screen, which looks smart and fresher than the appearance of the black handset. Setting up the handset was easy, with a step-by-step guide, which helped me connect to my Wi-Fi network.

The handset comes preloaded with different themes and pictures so you can personalise the phone. The widgets can be arranged alphabetically or by your favourites in the menu, which is a nice feature, allowing quick access to apps I use most regularly.

I was disappointed by the camera when I started using it. It is a 5 megapixel camera, but compared to the camera on my Samsung Galaxy Y the images just didn't seem focused and was a little disappointed with the lack of options for editing pictures.

The music player however is fantastic. It features Beats Audio technology, which improves the sound of music immensely, in fact I was astounded by how much better my music could sound.

The size of the handset is lovely, it fits into the hand nicely, making this easy to handle. I am rather clumsy with at times and unfortunately have dropped this a few times, leading to the screen being smashed, but this has been speedily fixed by my network provider through their insurance cover.

I pay £16 a month for this handset and I would say it is definitely worth that. If like me at the time you are on a budget it is definitely one to go with, because it has lots of good smartphone features and browsing with this handset is a breeze. In future I would probably pay a little more for my contract and opt for a slightly better phone, because I am a fan of gadgets and I would like more features.

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Great for a starter smartphone

I used to own a Blackberry Bold 9700, and for 2 years, that phone never left my side. I thought it was amazing, and that no phone could beat my Blackberry. Then my husband got a simple HTC wildfire, and within a few days I was totally jealous, mainly of his amazing app store, which left Blackberry App world standing in the shade. It took less than a week for me to realise that the Blackberry App store was miles behind its competition and didn't offer me as much as I thought, so I started shopping around. I didn't necessarily have a HTC phone in mind when I started browsing, I just wanted an Android phone, but as I checked out various phone websites, the HTC Desire C kept appearing, it was the android I was looking for, it was small, sleek looking, and has Beats Audio built in, so I knew playing my music on this was going to sound good.

When it arrived, I was quite shocked and pleased with the packaging. I remember the days when a mobile phone used to come in a fairly big cardboard box, filled with wires and discs and so on. The HTC Desire C came in a compact plastic case, that looked more expensive than it sounds! There was minimal wires, just a charger that doubles a USB lead, and a small pair of headphones, plus the handset and a small booklet of instructions.

The first trouble I had was getting the back off to insert the battery! There was no instructions that told you how to do that bit! I tried sliding it off, pulling it off, until finally I realised there is a tiny groove behind the power button and I had to try and get my nail in there to flick that back, so the whole thing comes off. I have had this phone since August 2012, and I still struggle now to get the back off as its stiff and doesn't come off together, I always feel like I am going to crack the back casing. While I am talking about the back though, I will say that the inside of the back of the phone is gorgeous! Everything is covered by a clear casing but it is bright red, and looks great, you can see some of the technology gadgetry bits through the casing but the colour is a wow factor. I wish they had made the back case of this the same red because then this phone would have really popped!

The handset is really light, especially compared to a Blackberry. You get 3.5inches of touchscreen, which is a lot of the phone. I would say the phone altogether is 4.5inches, so the majority is screen, meaning its nice and big! There are speakers on the front and back of the handset, so when you have music playing that Beats Audio kicks in and it sounds great, like I am playing a cd through a real stereo. The colours on the screen are amazing. I never really paid much attention to colours on a phone before, but they are really clear and sharp, and watching videos looks much better quality because of this.

Of course after setting my phone up, one of the first things I wanted to do was hit the app market! I always use the Google Play Store, which is pre installed, but there is also the HTC Hub that you can apparently get apps from, too, but I have never used that one. Installing an app is so simple, and you get a little arrow appear at the top of your screen so you can check the progress, they usually download in less than 30 seconds. Another thing I love is that when you have an app installed, the phone checks daily to see if there are any updates and if it finds any it will automatically download and install those, too.

I have around 15 apps installed that I use pretty much daily, plus another 10 or so others, plus hundreds of photos and my music, and I still have memory left on my phone, and I don't have an additional memory card either. There is 4gb of memory built in to the phone, for my personal uses that's more than ample, but the phone does have a memory card slot if you need more.

The downside to the apps is that the phone comes with, in my opinion, too many pre installed apps that you cannot remove. Apps like Play Books, and Play Movies, I have never used and probably never will, yet they cannot be removed. I wish there was the option to do so, so then that would free up a bit more memory, too.

The Desire C has a 5mp camera. It takes good enough pictures, and has the facial recognition technology so it has a box come up that detects a face in the picture and will try to make it clearer, but in this day and age a 5mp camera is a bit behind the times, and I would have loved a more powerful camera. I would have also have liked this phone to have a flash, taking pictures in dim lighting, or at night etc is impossible which I found a bit of a let down as I was always the 'person with the camera' and I feel I have missed a lot of good picture opportunities with this.

The battery life, at first, was pretty good, I got around 3 days use before I would charge overnight. As I added more apps and spent more time using the phone, I now get 2 days if I don't use it too much, if I spend a lot of the day on the phone or messaging, I only get 1 day out of it.

Considering a mobile phone is supposed to be about phoning, I should mention that the speakers sound good and clear when you are on the phone. The contact list could do with some work as I don't like the fact it puts all your latest calls at the top of the list, I would just like to be able to scroll through my phone book easily to get to a number.

I did at one point have to take my phone to a shop, as for some reason the handset had a personality problem and believed it was French! I couldn't work out why every time I sent a text message, or used Facebook or Twitter, my words would have little accents above them, or my predictive text would keep changing my words into French ones. If you are not used to phones like this, at the bottom of your touchscreen keyboard, there is a 'key' that has EN written on it, only when my phone arrived, it was set to FR, which now I know stood for French, and needed to be set to EN for English!

I do love this phone, I think its great for a starter smartphone. As I said before I got this phone in August 2012, so I have had it 10 months now, and it is starting to get very slow. It takes a while to load screens up, more often than not it struggles to open up apps and they crash and have to be closed and reopened again, in the last week my alarm clock has stopped working and just doesn't go off anymore. I had to take a 2 year contract out for this phone, and its starting to struggle and it hasn't made it to one year yet, and I am seriously beginning to wonder how I am supposed to make it last another year until I can upgrade. It is a shame because it is a great little phone, I just don't think it was built with a very long shelf life.

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Not even worth the low price now, stay clear.

I had finished my contract and had an upgrade available I'd had a choice between an iPhone and this. I made the complete wrong decision which tied me in for 2 years with this under average brick. I am still not out of this contract yet and I don't even have the phone! We'll get onto that later though.

These are the specs and capabilities for this phone:-It is 3G ready-Weighs 100 g-HTC Sense version is 4.0- Has a Beats Audio sound enhancement-Memory card slot is microSD and can hold up to 32GB-Internal storage is 4GB-512MB RAM-Has bluetooth -The camera is 5MP, 2592 x 1944 pixels, can record video-The OS is Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) which cannot be upgraded to the next level (4.1 Jelly Bean)- The CPU is 600MHz, Cortex-A5-Has a radio. GPS-Comes in Polar White, Stealth Black, Flamenco Red- Organizer- Document viewer/editor- Voice memo/dial- Predictive text input

Now that all of the boring stuff is out of the way lets talk about my experience with this phone. Now at first I was more than happy with it, played the games I wanted it too, could watch YouTube videos, do the general stuff I would with my phone. But this did not last. After around 4 months I started encountering problems. This started with messages taking forever to load which I passed off as being because it was clogged up with stuff so I deleted them, same problem. I tried deleting so many things but nothing worked, I dealt with it for a while until more things started to go wrong. It would delete apps randomly, reset randomly, couldn't answer calls, messages decided to stop loading after a while.

It got so slow I was always getting frustrated so in the end I called up HTC Europe and they collected it and 'fixed it' It came back was alright for around a week then the same problems appeared, sent it off again. Came back and now the phone wouldn't charge. So I have now currently sent it off for repair for the third time, they have had my phone for 2 weeks now, I have contacted them they said they have no idea what is wrong, or what may have gone wrong I was told to wait. I am now very angry and disappointed with HTC. Maybe this is why I am being so harsh on the phone, this company has acted like a start up run by idiots. I can't believe how things turned out.

I reviewed the Wildfire and for a phone at base level it is better than this because it actually lasts. I am simply annoyed with HTC as a whole with their phones and service. I personally was thinking of getting the HTC One when I first got this phone now I am staying far clear of any HTC product in the future. Unreliable in so many ways.

Although my personal views this phone did work for a few months and was great, short term its great. Long term it is a complete waste of money and time.

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I have had my HTC Desire C since October last year and so far so good! The design is very sleek and the size is not too big but not so small you struggle to do anything with it! The keyboard buttons when texting/emailing are also a good size as I find some very small and end up pressing the wrong ones. The one thing I would say is the memory is not very big without a memory card so it is worth purchasing one of those as well (cheap to buy). Overall, very easy to use and get the hang of. Definitly a good buy.

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A good, basic, app-capable phone.

Overall: HTC have certainly just sprung the little Desire C out of nowhere.

Design: It's like a shrunken-down pebble-shaped version of the HTC One X. It fits really nicely in the hand, as it's a 4.2" phone, with a 3.5" screen, and only 2.4" wide. At 12.5mm thick, it is a little chubbier than most phones this size, but that's a good thing, as it feels more solid. The design itself is really simple, available in black or white. I chose white, just because I thought it looked a little snazzier.

Camera: Although HTC boasts a 5MP camera on this one, I'd beg to differ. The lens is a single, rear-facing deal, without sensors or even an LED flash. I avoid taking night photos or close-ups with the camera, as the quality is just not good. Daytime shots, or ones in good light are pretty decent though.

Software: Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. One of the best features, in my humble opinion. Apps can be downloaded in a jiffy, and there's plenty of homescreen space for widgets, including quick links to up to four apps. HTC has blended the overlay very well too, as it doesn't look too foreign nor too plain and boring.

Battery life: Pretty good for only a 4.6Wh battery. It lasts me a solid 36-48 hours before dropping below the 10% mark and needing a top up.

Storage: A bit iffy, only offering 4GB before needing a microSD card. Saying that, I only added a 2GB micro, and that's holding all my music, images and videos, so you don't have to bump it up too much.

Connectivity: A nifty little charger-come-USB cable is included with the phone, similar to that used with an iPhone. Plug straight into a socket to charge, or remove the USB cable from the plug to connect to your computer. The earphones provided don't really do the Beats Audio justice, but that was quickly rectified with a pair of Heartbeats. A 3.5mm jack is as standard.

Overall, despite a couple of downsides, the HTC Desire C is a great little phone if you're venturing into the world of apps and don't want to spend £500 or so on an all-singing all-dancing iPhone or Samsung Galaxy. At around the £170-mark, you get a pretty decent phone.

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A fair smart phone

I've had the Desire C since August this year, when I received it as an early upgrade from my network provider. Having previously had a Wildfire, I was quite happy to stick with the HTC brand (although before the smart phone era I'd owned a Nokia 3310 and the Motorola's V220 and razr K1).

I'm coming at this review from the point of view of your average user - I'm not interested in having the best/latest phone, I'm not massively into technology, and I don't necessarily understand all the techincal specs and info. I use my phone to call, text, access the internet, facebook and sometimes play silly little game.

Texting: I find sending a text on this phone pretty easy, the keys aren't too close together for the most part although often when I want to insert a '?' and I'm typing quickly, I end up missing the one that changes to the symbols and numbers so I end up typing 'mk' instead. Apart from that sending a text is simple - messages are shown up in speech bubbles, yours in white and received ones in green. Each person/phone number is stored as a seperate thread so you can read back through your entire contact with them for the life of that phone.

Calling:If you sync your facebook account with the phone then when one of your friends calls you the phone will show up their profile photo and latest status. I can hear people clearly through the speakers which is obviously a big bonus!

Typing in a phone number is quick, with 'recent calls' being one click away on the phones main page. Delving deeper into the menu you have a phonebook which imports all your facebook contacts, whether or not they have their number listed on their account which I do find a bit irritating - I have about 250 facebook friends, I have never rung probably 200 of them and never will, they don't need to be in my mobile contacts list.

Facebook:There are some improvements here from when I had it on my old HTC, especially when it comes to photo uploads as you can choose what album it uploads to, plus you can add captions and tag people. My phone will also buzz me whenever I get a notification although sometimes this reaction is a little delayed.

Internet:I haven't downloaded any browsers, just used the one that came on the phone. I haven't had any problems here in terms of functionality or anything crashing like the other reviewer of this phone has mentioned, but sometimes it can be a tad slow to load even when internet signal is strong.

Camera:Unlike the wildfire this phone does not have an inbuilt flash/light function and as such is absolutely useless in low light (although the light on the wildfire was poor anyway) - even indoors during the day or with the lights on the images still tend to come out dark even if you've picked the low light option.

Essentially the camera is pretty shoddy in anything but good light - that said as a professional photographer I'm going to be picky! I do still use the camera for record shots when I'm not carrying a proper one with me as it still comes in handy for all sorts of things. Resolution wise it's 5mp which is more than enough for a phone camera - for all you pixel peepers out there, more does not equal better!

Gallery:You can arrange your images into different folders, select multiple images to email etc (better than some other phones I've seen that will only select one image a time to email). Using the share option you can choose to upload or send images to various destinations, including instagram which is a simple process and one I have made use of numerous times.

Music:This phone comes with beats audio which is supposed to be a superior music experience - can't say it sounded anything special when listening through the speaker, but I did try the headphones and must admit it sounded pretty nice. That said I very rarely listen to music on my phone, so it's not a feature I tend to make use of.

Looks:This isn't the most stylish phone at first looks - infact it's appearance is pretty unremarkable, there's nothing good or bad to say about it really! The LCD screen takes up most of the front, with a small HTC scripting at the top and 3 touch screen buttons at the base. On the rear is an embossed 'HTC', a small speaker and the camera lens. Where the phone gets really interesting is when you take off the rear - it's see through and bright red inside, absolutely love it, however you don't tend to walk around with the back of the phone off so it's a bitg pointless really.

Connectivity:The phone has what I assume to be a pretty standard USB socket - at least it's the same as my previous HTC and is also the same as my boyfriends Galaxy S2. Inside storage is on a micro SD card (not supplied) - I use a 4gb in mine, which I transferred over from my previous phone and this can of course be removed and put into a computer/printer when used with the right adaptor.

Soon after getting this phone I won a Sony Xperia ray which I decided to try out - the Sony has a better camera and is thinner so it sits in the hand easier, but I've got so used to the HTC brand I found myself going back to it as I just knew where everything was already, suppose that shows me up to be a bit of a technophobe!

Overall I'm fairly happy with this phone - it's by no means at the top of the scale when it comes to what's on the market at the moment, but its price reflects its ability (mine was free with my contract, but a quick look on amazon tells me you can now buy this phone for as little as £125). Yes it could be better but essentially it does what I need it to and in such a throw away society where technology becomes obsolete so soon, it seems silly to me to go for a top of the range high end product.

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Firstly, I'll note that in this review I'll cover some points regarding the phone supplier/network provider as well as reviewing the phone itself.

I previously had a Samsung Galaxy S and a contract for £30 per month with 1GB limited data. I would say I'm a moderate user and not into downloading lots of things or using many apps, but even so that 1GB was very restricting and I always had to ration data usage carefully in order not to start being charged extortionately for going over the limit. (This also in spite of using Opera, a low-bandwidth web browser designed particularly for mobile users.)

I renewed with a £13 per month contract offering unlimited data and a free phone. The phone of course being the HTC Desire C I'm reviewing here. An annoying issue was that even though I was negotiating the new contract on the phone with the network provider's call centre I was offered the choice of a black or white phone. I asked for a black phone. The call centre person said in conformation, "White". I said no, I want a BLACK phone. The person ummed and ahhed. Guess what they sent me? Yep, a white phone. Now why bother offering if you aren't going to provide me with the choice I want? Tut.

Something else about the supply of the phone that is noteworthy, is that I had a dreadful time getting the phone delivered. The courier was DNS, and they were completely and utterly dreadful to deal with. I live in an out of the way spot that isn't shown on GPS, so I usually have to give delivery companies some verbal details of where to send stuff. That was completely IMPOSSIBLE with DNS. Any phone numbers to deal with this company connect you to automatic prompts, which give you no option in any way to speak to a human being. So the day the phone was due to arrive, it didn't. I'm not going into every detail about the ridiculous hassles I had over the next three days trying to get the dratted thing, including trying go through the network provider who themselves are very difficult to reach (Three network in this case), but I was absolutely tearing my hair out, having had to stay at home for THREE DAYS!!! to eventually get the thing at last. It was unbelievable! Truly, truly bad.

So onto the phone itself. It's OK, but not great. It was free with the contract so I shouldn't complain.

However, if you want a decent smartphone that will do the things you want a smartphone for, buy one that has a better processor than this. The spec is 0.5 Ghz, and it's simply not enough for the phone to work without constant app or web browser crashes. I have three browsers installed, Opera Mobile, Dolphin HD and the one that came with it, Internet Explorer. None of these operate satisfactorily on this phone. Indeed, since Opera recently got an update, it's falling on its head constantly. IE and Dolphin I have for the times when I want to view video or full desktop pages that Opera isn't equipped for, but they are pretty hopeless for general use on a phone (didn't work that great on the Galaxy S). But seriously, if even a slimmed-down browser like Opera can't work, it's not worth bothering about.

Other issues are that it's noticeably slow to render pages clearly. A page will come up, but it'll be blurry for long enough until it's completely loaded. Such an attribute was never apparent on my old Galaxy S.

When rotating the phone, the change of screen orientation is also slow and jerky, unlike the smooth seamless flow of the Galaxy S. I should note in its favour, that although it's a much neater phone than the Galaxy, the visible screen actually isn't that much smaller, just a few millimetres on either axis.

Next issue - hate the headphones supplied with it. The phone is supposed to be supplied with Beats Audio, which is supposed to provide good quality sound, but when I have a pair of earphones that don't fit at all comfortably, and won't stay in my ears even when stationary, never mind on the move, (I've tried rotating these things in my ears 360 degrees, frankly I can't see how they're supposed to fit...) leak sound to the environment, and basically, JUST DON'T GIVE GOOD AUDIO, well, I'd love it if someone can rec me a good compatible pair of in-ear phones I can buy. Because it's worthless as a music player with these.

If there's one good think I like about the HTC implementation, it does do over the air, -painless- operating system updates. This was my biggest gripe about the Galaxy S, which required you to install the world's worse PC software, Samsung Kies on a PC, connect a cable between the phone and the software (half the time the software wouldn't recognise the phone) and then would often behave in a scary manner such that one lived in fear of the phone OS being rendered unusable by this hideously clunky method. No. The HTC has been effortless in that respect. There was a simple initial setup to do, and that was it. I think that it's sometimes doing an OS update, but it actually doesn't appear to interfere with the phone operation in any way, or demand restarts. With the Galaxy S, you had no clue what was going on half the time or if it had actually finished. There were times I had to take the battery off as it would just sit there either blank or endlessly cycling the startup screen...

The HTC came with the most current version of Android available at the time. With regard as to what else was supplied, you have the irritation of being forced to have Google+ and Facebook apps that continually want to update all the time (who do you know uses Google+?). I do not want either of these, but I can't uninstall them. Whereas the phone has no support for Twitter, so I can't readily share photos there. Absolute pain. The only reliable way I can do it is to send a photo to a PC from the phone and upload it from there. Pah! It didn't come with a memo app either, but I've downloaded the free app ColorNote for that, and it's very good, very intuitive and simple to use.

I don't play games on my phone, so can't give you any info about those. The last thing I'll mention is tethering, and this is to sling some mud at the network provider again. I spend the odd day away from home, and take my notebook PC to do work etc. While in the house, I've got landline broadband I can connect the notebook on. Now web browsing on the HTC as mentioned above is a poor user experience. So given that the phone has a supplied hotspot app, I gave that a go one day when I was getting sick of the lousy web browsing capability. Lo and behold, it worked wonderfully! Instead of screwing up my eyes peering at a tiny screen, I could use get good use of my notebook web browser. The connection would be fitful at times, but overall it was quite serviceable and better than using the phone. However. The bad people at Three cottoned on to it after a couple of weeks and blocked it. They sent a page to the browser saying effectively, if you want to do this we'll charge you more. If you want to use a laptop, buy a mobile broadband dongle. They said it's cheaper to use a dongle.

Now, dear reader, I'm locked into a two year contract supposedly offering unlimited broadband. I'm not an excessive user compared to most people. And it is NOT cheaper to use a dongle. Dongles come with fixed usage limits. For that lower limit, Three charge more than my monthly contract cost. So why do they think I should have a landline broadband connection, a mobile connection via dongle, and a connection via a phone? Now you can hardly buy a mobile phone contract nowadays that doesn't come with a data allocation. Basically it's yet another way for the mobile phone companies to restrict usage while enhancing their profits. Don't we love 'em.

One last point worth chucking in, this phone comes with NO onboard storage. You have to go out and buy a mini SD card. I opted for an 8GB card for £4 from Tesco, though if you need more, you can get a 32GB card from Amazon for around £14-15.

I guess I should say that ultimately it's a question of what you get for a phone that retails at £50, the Desire, versus one that can cost around £400 for a current model, the Galaxy. Of course, in a couple of years hence once the market is saturated, they'll all be cheap as chips...